What Do We Do About Illegal Immigrants?

In one sense, the answer is obvious: arrest them and deport them. Enact, and enforce strictly, laws barring employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Nowadays, one must show proper, legal photo identification to do just about anything, and certainly this is necessary to get normal employment. Other than places like the construction trades, where contractors might find day laborers and pay them in cash, nearly all employers know, or can find out, if their employees are citizens or legal residents. In the 18th and 19th centuries North America was a vast, fertile, largely empty place, and there was a drive to find immigrants to people the plains. In those days, most farmed and some ran small businesses that arose to service the rural population. While, arguably, the US is still not densely populated, very few people farm and rural areas have been losing residents, particularly the young, to cities for more than 50 years. Most people are now not self-employed; they work for someone else. And as our population nears 300 million, do we have a shortage of workers, or even people in general? I've heard noone make that argument.

I did run across an approach today that surprised me. Basically, we should give up on immigration enforcement since it's unenforceable. It's an intriguing argument; perhaps we should widen it to all "unenforceable" laws: drugs, jaywalking, speeding, prostitution. Just throw up our hands and surrender. Difficulties in enforcing laws will always be a hindrance though I can't imagine any lawmakers taking the surrender stance. It wouldn't sell well to the voters. Another perspective would simply make the illegal legal. It's a different sort of surrender, and one the President supports. We have no "war" on illegal immigration. An ordinary citizen might ponder that; the growth of immigrant communities hits our local newscasts and newspapers with regularity and seems to have more influence on our real lives than Saddam ever did. Why do you suppose the DC honchos want to legalize the illegal?

One reason could be the oft stated, never explicated, ellipsis truncated, view that immigrants do jobs Americans won't do. From the coal mines of West Virginia to the fields of death in Iraq, I'm not certain exactly what jobs Americans won't do. The unspoken part of this position is that Americans don't want some jobs at the offered wages and benefits. This is the real issue: immigrants, and illegals in particular, work cheaply. Of course, their presence greatly expands the labor supply, increasing job competition, and drives down wages. It's, to normal persons, a peculiar philosophy that America can't afford to pay good wages and benefits to citizens to provide for their own welfare, but we can afford a trillion dollars for a war in Iraq, and who knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars to build weapons no sane society would ever need or use. A suspicious person might think he was being hoodwinked. Too bad some cheaper CEOs aren't among those wading the Rio Grande.

One thread that runs through the immigration debate is the bigotry/racism card. There may be some truth to it though I challenge its relevance. We don't need more workers; we don't need more people; we already have more than we can handle taking care of our own. Economic refugees have had a very hard time gaining official acceptance here. We apparently don't want Haitians. A few days ago the New York Times reported that 72% of black male high school dropouts in their twenties are jobless. As a nation, and within the ruling junta, there seems little concern for these young men and seemingly no imagination for tapping this large labor supply. If we are to worry about bigotry, let's start with our own citizens. Why is it that Mexico and Central American countries can't provide sufficient employment for their own citizens? If our politicians' and business owners' argument is that they want cheap labor then they should make that explicit. Let's have that debate out in the open.

If you follow our national politics you'll notice what has become almost a truism: that the Democratic Party is mostly silent and impotent. It could be because they don't connect with the voters: we want peace and good jobs and societal stability. And Democrats have nothing to offer here since they work for the same corporations as the Republicans. So the debates rage mostly over tangential issues such as religion in schools, abortion, etc. I don't denigrate those themes. I just note that they are, in fact, peripheral to the central problems most of us face most of the time. At least the immigration issue has tentacles in all sorts of areas. If we can't keep people from entering illegally to find work how do we propose keeping out the malevolent ones with bombs? Is surrender the only option?

Where Does The Time Go?

Age creeps up on you. You just go along living your life which is always in the here and now where you're always the same person, or so it seems. But then comes the time when you notice that the walk in the park or game of tennis leaves you more sore than you'd expected the next day and then the time comes when you start using the handrail to go down stairs. And then the day of realization: it's age. You're just not as spry or sure-footed as you'd always been. When the beautiful young people call you 'Sir' you know you're over the hill. The point here being that things happen slowly, incrementally, until one day your entire life has changed.

The same things happen in the larger spheres of our lives. The economy: Free trade seems like a good idea then one day we find that almost nothing is still manufactured in our homeland. And open borders seem like a good idea until wages seem to stagnate because there's a huge pool of people willing to work harder and cheaper than we are. Is this the wave of an incoming bright future or a deathknell to the good life? I have my own opinions and no doubt you have yours. But again, this doesn't all happen all at once. From the proliferation of cheap goods at Walmart to the loss of good-paying jobs takes time and the relationships between any one or two developments is rarely direct or linear. This does not mean the relationships are not causal. But can we do anything about it, or is it like life and age that moves on inexorably out of our control? From Thomas Jefferson's "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." to Abraham Lincoln's "Fourscore and seven years ago our Forefathers brought forth on this continent..." it has been at least an American, if not human, conceit that we can decide and can act to control our environment. One thing is certain: if we do not act we will not control.

One day we're told that Saddam Hussein is tied to 9/11 and Al Quaeda and we must go to war to defend ourselves. We do and three years later Iraq's a more dangerous place than under Saddam, the terrorists and terroristic threats worldwide are multiplying and there are no, were no, and THEY, THE WAR'S DESIGNERS AND INSTIGATORS KNEW BEFOREHAND, THERE WERE NO WMDs. By the logic of the time of Nixon, this administration should be run out of town using the appropriate congressional powers. The Congress knew how to do this when Clinton was in office and over what? Now, many, many tens of thousands of people are dead, killed because of what our government is doing in our names and with our money. But the Congress won't even conduct investigations of how we got into this mess and if anyone is culpable.

The President didn't go to the FISA court for NSA warrants because their actions are obviously unconstitutional. Warrants require naming suspects and evidence to be seized and what the Administration wants and did and is still doing is more or less searching everybody looking for evidence. And there is even an extension making the rounds at the Justice Department that if listening is okay then physical searches are too. Will people start to care once police cars line their streets and homes are systematically searched?

When I was a kid and had my toy soldiers I always thought of the battles they fought as changing everything, that normal life as we know it didn't happen; that no one went to work or on picnics because there was a war on, and in my child's universe that was true. But that is not true in real life. Except for those occasions when the war hits home, like 9/11, or the firebombing of Tokyo or the advance into Germany people simply went on with their lives. Did the war change nothing? Of course it did, but with inflation and lost sons and shortages people learned to cope. As Nazi Germany arose from the 1920's until in the government in '33 until "official" war in '39, life went on. Even so many of the most persecuted, eg, Jews waited too long to emigrate: "It won't get any worse, will it?"

If Americans don't care that their young men and women and country are caught up in a war of aggression --if other countries did what we are doing they would be considered guilty of war crimes, and we Americans should know since we to a large degree wrote the definitions, if Americans don't care that their Congressional representatives lack the spine to investigate and act accordingly, if Americans don't care that Iraq seems to be only the first step in an imperial aggression of remaking the Near East into our servant, if Americans don't care about the loss of their Consittutional rights --even those specifically stated in the Declaration of Independence when our then King George was the Third, if Americans don't really care about impoverishment and war and torture and $9 trillion in debt and the loss of liberty along with safety, if Americans don't care about these things then they will not act to change things and Americans will lose all. In a democracy, and all nations can work to achieve democracies through their own efforts, not as a gift from an invading army; in a democracy the people are supposed to be in control. But only if they act. Do we think the Japanese foresaw Hiroshima and chose aggressive war anyway, or that ordinary Germans foresaw the concentration camps and the destruction of their homeland and said "Keep up the good work, Adolf?" A lot of people in both countries probably did cheer the fascists on, but most, I imagine simply didn't pay close enough attention, disregarded the canary in their coal mine as an alarmist and when they all woke up, when reality pinched them, it was too late to avert disaster. There are a lot of things to be afraid of in our world; our own government shouldn't be one of them.

What would happen if...?

What's with this 'civil war' stuff in Iraq? From what I've read Iraq is supposed to be the least religious country in the region. It's supposed to be a tribal culture; thus, Saddam's ruling Sunnis were less Sunnis than Tikritis, the town and region whence he came. And while I can imagine religious tension and strife are we missing something (or being misled) by all this talk of a religious civil war? Picture Catholics at war with Baptists in the United States. Most religious denominations in Christianity contain a full spectrum of ideologies: think the Vatican versus liberation theology priests in Latin America, or pacifists versus flag-wavers in Protestant groups. Maybe this Sunni-Shiite 'war' is just a simplistic gloss on more basic struggles among different interest groups. I can imagine some Iraqis backing the US occupation and wanting strong ties to the US while other groups, more nationalistic or with different economic agendas, being in serious opposition. Reporters may be limited in their understanding, or limited in their space or time, or they could have ideological biases of their own. Perhaps what we have in Iraq is a central government that wants to consolidate power and is basically sending out death squads to eliminate the opposition (many reports claim the killers or kidnappers wear police or army uniforms, as though there were costume or uniform stores in Iraq to buy them). The US has an infamous, though not widely known, history in designing and implementing and supporting such policies. Think El Salvador, or Indonesia, or Guatemala, or the Philippines. Or Iran. And perhaps this is why US officials - Rumsfeld et al. - seem at a loss to do anything about the bloodshed: it's all happening by design. And that would then lend some kind of sense to Bush's statements this week about Iraqis building democracy. Most reports and analyses were struck by the seeming incongruity of the President's upbeat remarks juxtaposed with the carnage in the news; maybe what's happening in Iraq is what's supposed to be happening. This is a frightful thought. In the past, when the US supported murderously repressive regimes, few reports made it into the mass media. But Iraq is in our faces every day, every hour of every day. That is what makes it like Vietnam: the involvement of large groupings of US armed forces. And the steadfast determination of our "leaders" to stay the course is to buy time for a compliant Iraqi regime to arise and then it can become a proxy war.

This is a cynical interpretation implying malevolence. Depressingly, I have no trouble imputing malevolence to political leaders and their henchmen. What does slow me down is the seeming incompetence. Why, after three years, is there so much and constantly increasing turmoil within Iraq? Love 'em or hate 'em, there are some very smart people in Washington. But they may not have anticipated the opportunity that 9/11 presented and they have been scurrying frantically since then making hay. What the US is attempting in Iraq (and Iran) is not something new, or something that arose as a reaction to 9/11. Domination of the world is US policy. Did you know that is where your tax dollars go? To make us the biggest, baddest bully on Earth? All for democracy, of course. Some reports indicate that our President is 'out to lunch' with no interest other than being thanked by Iraqis for our 'sacrifices' on their behalf. If the chief isn't setting policy then the warriors choose their own and some may make decisions incompatible with others. Perhaps the chaos that is today's Iraq mirrors chaos in Washington. As I said, our government's goals are not new, or simply reactive. I think our Vice President was a founder of the Project for a New American Century which spells out the current Pentagon policy of projecting dominating military force worldwide and making other countries hew the line set by the Washington/Wall Street Consensus. And these things didn't arrive with Dubya. Colin Powell as a general bought into it and one of the 'deep' thinkers about it is Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Brzezinski. In fact, I think the utilization of unexpected catastrophe as a cause for projecting this power, of using such an event to unify our multicultural society for foreign excursions may have been one of Ziggy's ideas. Still, the incompetence. Or maybe it's just reality.

It's funny how the Congress wants to pass legislation to legalize Bush's spying, obviously indicating they don't think that heretofore it was legal. If that is the case then why have only three, count 'em 3, Senators bought into the Censure motion? And why have only a few dozen Representatives signed onto John Conyers' Impeachment inquiry? Personally I favor the cowardice explanation: with lamentably few exceptions, our politicians are spineless worms. I do think that covers a lot of ground. It's a tough job stroking yourself as a pampered representative in DC, but somebody's gotta do it. Would we be better off, or worse, if our politicos declared themselves unabashed fascists who want to build the Fourth Reich? (As the page title reads, I'm into simple things.)

I believe one problem finding mainstream opposition to the Bush agenda is precisely that it's the mainstream. Not all the "heavyweights" buy the full package of this New World Order, and most of them are too squeamish to have given the thumb's up to the current war, but they do live on the same side of the fence as the neo-cons: they only quibble over details, and it's only when the details become snags and catch the public's attention and worry that they mumble their profound inanities. In the deepest sense they don't provide leadership because they are already following their Leader. They may not like it but they stay inbounds, as though they were wearing those electronic dog collars.

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Riff
But most of the world, including most people in the US live on the other side of the fence. As the drive for profit is destroying our economic self-sufficiency and driving the majority of us towards anarchy and penury those relatively few who benefit can live the high life in their gated communities and watch us fight each other tooth and nail for the crumbs they throw our way. What is democracy? There is an argument that has been going on since the Articles of Confederation about this and there is a cogent body of analysis that our Founding Fathers weren't united about rule by the majority. If the Palestinians choose Hamas our leaders can try to scare us (and the Palestinians) about unwise and unacceptable choices, but what would happen if people in the US decided that they - the majority - wanted some fundamental changes? What if we wanted to curb free trade, to let all countries have protective tarriffs to prop up needed local industries? We are humans first, citizens second, workers third, and consumers last. Low prices mean low cost and low cost means mostly low wages and once you get to working poor what's left? Death? Slavery? Revolution? As with the New American Century, logic is only a tool, not a goal and can be used from any perspective.

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Still, why the morass in Iraq and what happens next and what are we to do about it? Motion pictures have been with us for more than three quarters of a century. While the pace of change in media and technology seems to have picked up in recent years and we are constantly flooded with sensory stimuli (and bewildered by it) I think it's fair to say that nearly everyone alive in the US today has lived in the era of mass media and movies may be the guide here. We all live with "stories" and stories follow scripts and good scripts are very tight: they must seem totally natural while being, in reality, totally unnatural. Reality is very messy; movies only allow messiness as a plot device. We are all so accustomed to "stories" - there's a beginning and plot development, climax and denouement, with all the loose ends nicely tidied up and even those few films that don't settle everything but have us leaving the theaters wondering and asking each other questions, even these are by design - that we are at a loss when things don't go as expected. In our personal lives we sigh or get angry when unexpected reality intrudes upon our plans. When it's our army overseas we just get scared.

Real life isn't a movie and our real conversations aren't as concise and portentous. But that doesn't mean that we don't want life to be a movie, with a great script, each of us our own Rocky. And reality doesn't stop us from trying to plan and constrain the future. So, the mass of Iraqis didn't toss flowers our way; Baghdad ain't Hollywood. Oh, yeah, right. I think the Big Worry is following the script. Flagging regimes seize upon crises to unify the peons and whip them into shape. If the war is going badly start another one. Another terrorist incident close to home and the bombs will be falling on Teheran. As the old statement goes: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! We can't be deterred by a few bumps in the road. Now, if this life we call our world were a movie the script would call for some dark, dangerous men to have the messiness already planned. If Osama won't comply they could make it seem as if he had. Sort of like the Gulf of Tonkin incident (see Truth is the First Casualty by Joseph Golden, probably out of print), a good script anticipates and plans everything, even the chaos. It would be nice to consider this line of thinking paranoid. The problem is that the fiction writers have managed to brainwash us all, including the politicos. They think they are hard-headed realists but propaganda is pervasive and what Woodrow Wilson unleashed upon us nearly a century ago has permeated all our minds. The line separating fantasy from reality has gotten blurry. The New World Order is pinching awake many of us in the "reality-based community" and the fall from the clouds is painful. Reality intrudes. Our leaders are still in dreamland. Maybe we need to awaken them from their dream, which is our nightmare.

Simplify, Simplify (Is This What Thoreau Really Meant?)

The Congress is getting ready to pass legislation authorizing the administration’s warrantless spying, simulataneously refusing to investigate that spying to date. This seems a bit odd. If they need to legalize it now wouldn’t that imply it was illegal until now? Wouldn’t this at least merit some investigation and a “consensus of the senate” which is sort of a ’sounds good - does nothing’ ploy of occasional use? Perhaps what the Congress should be debating is dissolving the two seemingly useless branches of government. Maybe we need a Constitutional amendment changing our form of government to have only our ‘unitary’ president.

If we are willing to subject ourselves to a ‘domineering dad’ then why bother having representative democracy in the first place? Democracy has become something of a code word. It means that our Leader can do whatever He wants since Father Knows Best. Our Leader can arrest and incarcerate the Supreme Court and the Congress if they attempt to interfere with His actions. After all He’s on a Mission From God, and any attempts to stymie His actions would only be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, thereby making them terrorists. And we are apparently in what they call a generational conflict. I don’t know why the administration is so short-sighted. The Boston Tea Party would qualify as terrorism and that was over two centuries ago. It seems more likely we are in a permanent, eternal (after all, God’s involved), state of war.

So, our Leader will lead us and protect us. His minions will read our words and hear our speech and see our actions and know our thoughts. This should almost guarantee our getting to heaven. Our Father The Leader will rewrite Genesis so that even sin will be impossible. Free will wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And knowledge isn’t very useful; our Leader has shown even a Dunce can save and protect us. And for those of us who may still harbor some doubts just give it some more time. You’ll come around; you’ll see the light. And if you don’t, KBR , from Herr Bormann’s former bailiwick, will have a nice home for you.